Fifteen Minutes of Infamy: Google’s Epic Fail

While you were sleeping in this morning, Google decided to break the internet for about 15 minutes. TechCrunch (along with most other blogs that are active this morning) has screencaps that show how every site was flagged as malware in the search engine. Whoops!

EDIT: Here's the official response from the Search Engine VP. I quoted a bit of it below. You can carry on with your digital lives, netizens.

We periodically receive updates to that list and received one such update to release on the site this morning. Unfortunately (and here's the human error), the URL of '/' was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and '/' expands to all URLs.

I ran into the warning, but decided to go ahead and continue to the malicious site.

this was a funny morning

woops

I thought the problem was on my end (proxy, noscript update, etc) until I read reports about other people having the same problem. Weird to see Wikipedia flagged as a malware site...

Damn, I missed it.

Originally Posted by Riftsaw

Damn, I missed it.

You didn't miss anything really. The main event is really the people screaming that the Internet is broken. You probably won't miss that.

I saw this happen too... I thought I was going to go crazy. I wish Google would knock it off with all their results, it's my choice to determine there is crap on a site.

That's probably about right...

Updated OP with Google's official response. The Intarwebz is safe! Yay!

SockMan! --
I thought the problem was on my end (proxy, noscript update, etc) until I read reports about other people having the same problem. Weird to see Wikipedia flagged as a malware site...

Yeah, when I tried to go to a Wiki page earlier and saw it was malware-flagged, I knew something was wrong hahaha...

I'm sorry for all the clueless people who will now think that all the sites they visit through google are harmless and are scared right now.

Originally Posted by LucasG

I'm sorry for all the clueless people who will now think that all the sites they visit through google are harmless and are scared right now.

They arent harmless?

Stuff happens, geez. If this had been Microsoft's doing there would have be a hanging in Redmond today.

Google is human afterall!

Originally Posted by trick_m0nkey

Google is human afterall!

Very human. Outside of Internet search (which is the best right now) and annoying ads everywhere (which I know is necessary for the money so I live with it) what does Google do that actually makes them money? Not a lot.

LoL at first I was like wuh? then I searched www.google.com and it warned me it might be a malicious site lol after a few min it stopped.

Google's not malware? Darn.

[H]ardOCP - This site has been flagged as malicious....

Well then infect me, baby, gimme' all you got.


It ended and i was all about the QQ

man , i thought perhaps they had gotten wise to my surfing habits


rofl